The Terror: Infamy showrunner talks ghosts, racism and the human spirit

AMC found success with the first season of The Terror by blending a fictional horror story with the real-life mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, which vanished as it searched for the fabled Northwest Passage in 1848. For season 2, AMC is delivering another ghostly tale with The Terror: Infamy. This time, the horror is drawn from ancient Japanese folklore, and the story rooted in the World War 2-era Japanese-American internment camps.

With Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) as executive producer, expectations for Infamy are high. The A.V. Club interviewed showrunner Alexander Woo (True Blood) at the 2019 Television Critics Association summer press tour, where they talked about Japanese ghosts, racism, otherness and the triumph of the human spirit.

The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 2 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

Woo and fellow showrunner Max Borenstein (Godzilla) have two professors specializing in Japanese folklore on their writing staff, but their specialized knowledge needed to be blunted in the early episodes because the characters don’t know exactly what kind of phantom they’re dealing with.

"Early in our show there’s a bunch of different terms that are bandied about because our characters don’t exactly know, because they use the term bakemono, which is a very general term for a spirit, usually more malevolent. Sometimes obake, which is a more neutral term. It could even be benevolent. Then sometimes yurēi, which is a vengeful ghost, the spirit of a deceased person who has somehow been wronged in life and has an insatiable hunger for vengeance. These terms are all being used at once because [the characters] don’t really know what it is. In a sense, they’ve forgotten. They’ve come all the way across the country and left those spirits behind, but they come back to haunt them."

It’s an interesting idea that the Japanese immigrants and their descendants have largely “forgotten” about the Old World spirits, so they’re caught off guard when the hauntings begin. It speaks to their enthusiasm and desire to start over in the New World of California, and the basic wish to become an American despite many obstacles thrown in their way.

Woo describes Infamy as “a historical story told through the language of genre.” What does that mean? He’s talking about employing genre tools to intensify the psychologically powerful horror elements of traditional kaidan folklore to offer a more intimate experience for the viewer. But it’s also important to remember that Infamy is much more than a scary story: there are many quiet character moments, the throes of young love, family conflicts, acts of courage, generosity and even humor.

“It felt very organic to us,” Woo said. “The strategy was always to deploy the horror as a means to help you get into the skin of the characters and what they’re experiencing … But it is not constantly being chased through the woods by a guy with a machete.” He’s plenty ready to let the blood spray when “it’s in service of us advocating the emotional experience of our characters,” but avoided overkill “because there’s so much more of the story that can be told without it.”

Mostly, The Terror: Infamy is a tale of people trying to live their lives while caught in an awful situation:

"That was a big thing for us to show, because the story of the internment isn’t just one of pure misery, though it was in fact of course miserable. It is also the story of the resourcefulness and resilience of the Japanese Americans who were in prison there, and they turned their prison into a home. There were schools and churches and baseball leagues and dances. People fell in love … They did not come out, or at least not everyone came out, broken by it. This is a story with great strength and bravery."

Image: AMC/The Terror

Woo describes some of the Infamy characters fitting inside of each other in a way akin to a Russian nesting doll. It all has to do with “otherness.” All of the Japanese-Americans are an “enemy” community of the “other.” Inside of that community, the Latina Luz (Christina Rodlo) is folded in an additional cloak of otherness. The eerie spirit Yuko (Kiki Sukezane), a being driven by a vengeance she may no longer even understand, appears to come from the ‘other side (death).’ Woo loves having the opportunity to deeply explore this universe in 10 one-hour episodes rather than within a two-hour movie where “[T]he ghost crawls out of the television set and that’s it.”

With respect to the Yuko character, Woo wants the viewer to be saturated with her ghastly otherness, but then be placed in the “uncomfortable” position of somehow feeling sympathy for the monster. He also acknowledges that Yuko represents the dangers of abandoning one’s past and ancestral culture, but he doesn’t want to delve any further into that topic.

Derek Mio as Chester Nakayama, Cristina Rodlo as Luz Ojeda – The Terror _ Season 2, Gallery – Photo Credit: Maxine Helfman/AMC

While Infamy focuses on the Japanese-American experience in an interment camp, Woo wanted to make sure they weren’t building a purely Japanese-American story. Along with the Mexican-American presence of Luz, there are also Jewish and typically “white” characters involved as well. There are a lot of different cultures mixing in 1941 Los Angeles, and racism will rear its ugly head in many ways in the following decades. “It’s not over when the internment ends.” Woo reminds us. “There will always be another group, and another group, and another group.”

Woo is proud of AMC’s willingness to take on a show like Infamy, saying the studio heads never questioned the use of subtitled Japanese or somewhat archaic Japanese folklore references. He believes we’re living in a time when every broadcaster has to take risks and produce unique programming, and telling a tale from a Japanese-American perspective, if done well, will be “embraced and rewarded” by audiences hungering for new dramatic landscapes.

Kiki Sukezane as Yuko – The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 1 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

Infamy is a multicultural story, but also one about very deliberately drawn characters with plenty of differences without their own cultural groups. Woo says that Chester (Derek Mio), being American-born, finds the kimono-clad Yuko exotic, which means he is likely to consider her more authentic:

"She (Yuko) is confronting him with the truth about himself. She says, ‘You’re a sparrow in a swallow’s nest. You think you’re safe, but you’re not.’ I don’t think he fully understands it yet, until of course it becomes all too obvious that he is not safe."

The themes of the Asian-American perspective and unperceived cultural danger are ones Woo keeps returning to. He believes that “there’s a moment where you delude yourself into believing that if you embrace the culture, the culture will just embrace you back.” Both Chester and his father are plugged into this hopeful, “aspirational” thinking, and they’re still clutching to it even as the American authorities strip their rights away.

Naoko Mori as Asako Nakayama, James Saito as Wilson Yoshida, Alex Shimizu as Toshiro Furuya  – The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 2 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

“The last thing you can cling to is you’re a citizen,” Woo continues. “Show them you’re a patriot. You’ll be okay. You were born here. You will be all right because you’re an American citizen.” He then turns to current political events, specifically President Donald Trump’s tweets urging four congresswomen — all of them American citizens, three of them born in the US — to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

“It was the mistake made in early 1942 that George [Takei] talks about,” Woo said, “mistaking Japanese Americans with Japanese. They are not one and the same. These are people who grew up in this country, who have embraced this country, who grew up in this culture. You send them back to Japan—or you send me to China, and they’ll call me an American.” Woo knows he would be an obvious foreigner in China. “The slur of telling someone to go back to where they came from is a deliberate conflation that you will never be an American. You’ll always be some other.”

Derek Mio as Chester Nakayama – The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 1 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

That’s why Woo thinks shows like Infamy can be important. This destructive sense of otherness is “… an ongoing cycle and one of the reasons why if we can move the needle that much and push the dialogue by an inch, it’s meaningful.”

“I don’t aspire to it having any other greater impact than just allowing people who want to come to the show from whatever means, because they’re all valid,” Woo explains. You can watch it because you’re interested in the historical era, for the pure spookiness, or for the uniqueness of the Asian-American perspective.

"But hopefully once you’re in, you understand the feeling of what it’s like to be in the skin of these people, and maybe by extension understand the plight of what it feels like to be an American but not have America want you. If that makes some people connect some dots, I think it will have been worth all of the sweat, and effort, and all the tears we’ve now expended in making the show."

INDEPENDENCE, CA – DECEMBER 09: A sign is posted at the entrance to Manzanar National Historic Site on December 9, 2015 near Independence, California. Recent presidential campaign rhetoric against Muslims in the wake of terror attacks has drawn comparisons to World War II era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of ten internment camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were incarcerated from 1942 to 1945 during World War II. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

It’s a cliche by now to point out that the United States is becoming increasingly polarized politically, with divisions between groups appearing to become more stark all the time. For Woo, Americans want to believe in a country that is just and right “because the dream of the idealized America is so tantalizing. You want to believe in it fully, that this is a place where you can make whatever you want out of yourself and it is based on fundamental fairness.”

But as Woo points out, American citizens have repeatedly been “betrayed” by rules unfairly applied. There is the feeling of “They moved the goalposts on me.” In conclusion, he refers to Infamy actor George Takei, who was imprisoned in internment camps as a little boy: “If he (Takei) wanted anything to come out of the internment (it) is for people to be reminded that it has happened before, that this is not a singular incident, and we have a history of it.”

The Terror: Infamy airs Monday nights on AMC at 9/8 p.m. Central.

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